Good Morning!
From the Community
There’s an AWS Community (as run by AWS itself) post about how Amazon Search uses Chaos Engineering. All of Amazon Search is basically a payola scheme now, so I’m not sure that "resilience" is their number one problem.
This is a glowing review of AWS Copilot CLI, which I endorse. I really like the CLI, I just wish it had made a few different choices at some point… Fortunately the escape hatches are easy to get to.
This thinkpiece titled I am not your Cloud person is worth a look.
Mux (who would certainly know!) has penned a piece stating that cloud encoding APIs are a dying breed. I think they’re right.
A guide to handling failures and dead letter queues with Amazon SQS.
The Seattle Times has an opinion piece positing that Amazon’s return-to-work mandate is about control. I think that whatever the reason, "Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer" is (unlike other Leadership Principles) nothing more than words on a page.
Arm wrestles expert’s domains away citing trademark issues • The Register – Arm has decided to start being jerks to someone who’s worked with them in good faith for years by filing a series of domain trademark issues. I’ve had a plan in place since I started Last Week in AWS; backup domains are in place and I’ll start talking a heck of a lot more about Amazon’s competitors in the renamed newsletter should they ever be so foolish as to play that card. I really liked Arm before this; this move is disheartening.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Degenerative AI
Last Week In AWS: Feeding the Snakes Barracuda
Screaming in the Cloud: Building a Community around Cloud-Native Content with Bret Fisher
Screaming in the Cloud: The Evolution of OpenTelemetry with Austin Parker
Choice Cuts
Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS announces Extended Support for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases – You can now pay more to run ancient versions of your database. Database upgrades are scary, and our favorite (and increasingly rent-seeking) cloud provider is willing to take your money to avoid that pain.
Amazon CloudWatch adds Amazon EKS control plane logs as Vended Logs – Exorbitantly priced logs are now less exorbitant once you generate enough of them to get into the more reasonable pricing tiers.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces regular expression filter pattern syntax support – As SwiftOnSecurity pointed out a week or two ago, a lot of folks can now discover firsthand just how many of their rules allow all 10* traffic like 101.25.26.94 because the admin/programmer didn’t realize 10.* is a regular expression.
Introducing Amazon EC2 R7iz instances – This is awesome and I’m sure somebody is getting fired because this doesn’t mention Generative AI even once.
AWS Marketplace now supports AWS CloudTrail to improve procurement activity monitoring – "Who the hell was embezzling money via the AWS Marketplace" is now way easier to track down.
AWS Step Functions launches enhanced error handling – Ooh, custom error messages rather than "guess, check, be wrong, give up?" Sign me up, please.
AWS Trusted Advisor adds 1 new fault tolerance check – Trusted Advisor (motto: “We know how to save you money / be more secure / ensure greater reliability, but we won’t tell you unless you pay us at least $100 a month per account”) now has another check of questionable value to sell you.
Announcing daily disbursements for AWS Marketplace sellers – Earlier this year, we had a client opt to pay us for a consulting project through the AWS Marketplace, and I’ve gotta say I don’t care about daily disbursements: it was still the most complicated, convoluted way to get paid that I’ve encountered in recent memory. It took several support tickets just to get their system to do what it says on the tin. Burn the thing down and start over; good lord.
Embracing FinOps to Maximize Cloud Value and Control Costs with the Deloitte FinOps Framework – Yes, to save money in cloud choose Deloitte, a company so forward-looking that their website redirects to a "www2" subdomain. Nothing quite says "we are having some challenges with our digital transformation" quite like that; the galling part is that they purport to help other companies with the same thing they’ve obviously stumbled with.
Transforming Aviation Maintenance with the Infosys Generative AI Solution Built on Amazon Bedrock – Disclosure: my lawyer-wife works at Infosys; they pay my health insurance. She’s great! Please continue not suing me, sweetie–and happy anniversary! Now then: what the hell kind of travesty is this?! Bedrock is in private preview and not available for general customer use yet, and the marketing story they’re going with here is using it for something as finicky, sensitive, high touch, and important as aviation maintenance? What the hell does AWS think it’s doing here, exactly?
How Vercel Shipped Cron Jobs in 2 Months Using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler – 0 0 1 */2 *. You’re welcome.
How contact center leaders can prepare for generative AI – The real answer / subtext here is that you should start preparing lists of who you’re going to lay off as soon as the robot is good enough to take their job away. As a customer: yuck.
A Culture of Resilience – Yes, when your stock price has been flat, your employee perks aren’t terrific, you’ve besieged your workforce with layoffs, then you mandate a hamfisted and poorly justified return to office strategy? Yeah, your company is absolutely going to need a culture of resilience.
How generative AI is energizing the beauty industry – This is clearly a partnership deal, since the pig of Generative AI (as exists at AWS) sure does need a lot of lipstick.
Migrating AWS Direct Connect to a new location – Having done multiple data center moves over the course of my career, I can safely say that the best approach is to start by taking a good inventory of your existing data center, then burn the thing to the ground for the insurance money so you can start over.
Reduce the security and compliance risks of messaging apps with AWS Wickr – Titling a blog post about their hyper-secure newly acquired messaging toy with the phrase "reduce the security and" shows the lack of attention to detail so much of AWS’s marketing efforts have exhibited lately. Methinks the layoffs have cut too deep.
AWS Guild Tournament builds cloud skills and innovative customer solutions – How does the attendees’ personal hygiene at one of these things compare to a Magic: The Gathering tournament?
From chocolate sales to a career in cloud with training from AWS re/Start – At my "startup" tier of account managers (which is solely based upon spend levels), the majority of them were selling mattresses, used cars, and gym memberships two months ago. Most of them haven’t been great, but don’t worry; they sure don’t last long before being rotated out yet again. I think I’m on something like my eighth so far?
Amazon to Discontinue Honeycode App-Building Service – AWS won’t make an announcement about it in its usual places, so here’s a Business Insider link talking about it (paywalled). It brings me no pleasure to say that I was right a few years ago in my fear that AWS would screw up the low-code arena and set the field back years in the process; I like low-code tools! I’m writing this paragraph in one (Retool) that I used to build an entire production system! Shame AWS can’t get out of its own way / admit to itself that some markets are ones it’s not poised well to serve.
Tools
We’ve built and released an AWS Network Map because I was tired of not having one. It shows regions, CloudFlare edge locations, Direct Connects, and a host of other things. Try it, let me know what you think.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
